Writer Craft Wednesday – Deadlines and What To Do With A Very Long Book

I often say I’m a slow writer.

My editor disagrees. It’s not that I write slowly, it’s that I write long.  Really, really, REALLY long.

In romance it isn’t uncommon to see a novel that’s 40,000 – 60,000 words long, especially over on the indie ebook side. Romance readers are known to be voracious and publishers (and their indie counterparts) turn out new romance novels on a weekly basis. Political thrillers, spy novels, and cozy murder mysteries are rarely much longer, usually coming in around 70,000 – 85,000 words apiece. Sometimes shorter if they’re from a small press or indie author.

Sci-fi and Fantasy, long the bastions of long books, still have plenty of “shorter” works, 75,000 tends to be the low end for print but even the big presses publish 40,000 word novellas as ebooks.

And, at the end of the day, I’m a sci-fi author. I write other things too, but my default is spaceships, science, and explosions. Relationships get worked into the mix, for better or worse, but my favorite thing to read and write is science fiction. Where the longer books live.

My first three SF novels were right around 90,000 words each. That’s a solid size for a debut series. But, looking back, I see where I would add to the books. Add more description. Explore a subplot more. Just… little things.

In 2019 I finished one novel and did heavy rewrites on a second. One of them is 135,000 words and the other is 125,000 words.

Which is a problem when my contract said 90,000 – 100,000 words.

CHANGE OF MOMENTUM is a massive beast of a book. My crit partners couldn’t find anything to cut. I couldn’t find anything to cut.  The editor, bless their soul, found things to ADD.

To. Add.

As in: put more words in this giant book.

That was a problem.

Problem #1 – Big Books Make Less Money – there’s a simply cost problem when it comes to big novels, paper and ink cost money. Big books cost more to print, ship, and store. They’re just expensive. And the American market is not friendly to expensive books (that’s a rant for another time).

Problem #2 – Big Books Take Longer To Edit – my editor’s schedule was set with room for a 90,000 word novel. An additional 40,000 words is 160 extra pages, or the length of ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS A WEREWOLF. It adds two weeks to almost every stage of editing and an additional week to formatting. Could it be done faster? Mmm…. maybe? But to get it right I have to give the team helping me with the book to do their jobs correctly. Accuracy is more important than speed in this case.

Problem #3 – Big Books Are A Hard Sell – there are readers (like me!) who love big books. But there are also a lot of readers who just don’t want to commit to a big book. I can read a 600 page novel in an afternoon. Most people need a month.

All of this meant my editor scheduled a meeting with me to discuss our options.

Option #1 – Cut The Book In Half – it makes two 70,000 word novels. Cutting it in half would be a *great* solution if there was a place to cut it. But no one on the team could find a good place to cut it.

Option #2 – Raise The Price – a sensible option, especially for my publisher, but combined with Problem #3 this wasn’t my favorite option ever. I want people to be able to afford to read the books.

Option #3 – Change the Size Of The Book – a slightly larger format means a significantly shorter page count and the book wanders back into the realm of affordable. Big, but affordable.

But there was another elephant in the room…

The editor sent line edits back with a request for a new scene. Working on that I realized I needed to entirely overhaul over 6,000 words. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s about 25 pages of new writing and I wasn’t going to get that done with a seventy-two hour turn around. Remember, I have a life outside writing. It’s the busy season for parents with kids in choir, scouts, drama, and every other little thing going on.

Any delay on my part meant the schedule was off.

Which, you know, par for the course for the Fleet of Malik books.

BODIES IN MOTION was a tiny bit cursed. … okay, it was very much cursed. I’m not sure which elder god or law of nature I offended with that book but the ebook that went out to readers the first week was a rough draft with highlights in it. It was mortifying, terrifying, and (let us pray) one of the worst parts of my publishing career. Uploading the correct file five times didn’t fix the problem. It just was cursed. Terribly cursed.

CHANGE OF MOMENTUM got caught in a terrible mess earlier this year. I blogged about it in September. In October it looked like late February would work. Last week my editor suggested we nudge the book from 25-February to mid-March.

I suggested late April because I’m hoping this will give us enough of a cushion to protect the book from all other ills. I may need to get someone to perform a purification ritual or something for the series. Who knows! It’s messy, but it’s there.

 

WHY IS THIS ON WRITER CRAFT WEDNESDAY?

Because this is publishing.

Behind the scenes things are messy. Books take weird turns. Deadlines get missed. Life happens. Authors have days they can’t write.

It would be lovely if every author made their deadline without fail.

It would be lovely if editors never got sick, left their jobs, changed publishing houses, or died.

It would be lovely if literary agents were immortal and always available.

But publishing is run by a bunch of messy, squishy humans who get sick, change jobs, attend funerals, have babies, get fired, quit, and everything in between. There are going to be bad days. There are going to be set backs. There are going to be books that do unexpected things.

The important part, for a writer, is to know what you really want.

CHANGE OF MOMENTUM is a true enemies-to-lovers sci-fi romance. Hollis and Rowena don’t just have grudges, they have blood on their hands. They fought on the opposite sides of a civil war and bringing them together took a lot more than a quick apology and some sexual attraction. That kind of relationship wouldn’t have done the characters justice. It wouldn’t have worked with what I wanted for the book.

The entire series is about redemption arcs. I wanted to write not about a war, but about how people recover from war. How we forgive when someone seems unforgivable. How we forgive ourselves when we realize something in our past is something we regret doing, even if we had a good reason at the time.

To get that kind of story on the page I needed a lot of words.

And I agree with my editor, there’s an emotional beat missing and I need to add something to make the ending work.

What I want is not a book that can be written quickly or cut into pieces or trimmed down. That’s fine. That’s what I want.

When you write, you need to know what you want. That becomes your goal and your measuring rod for the success of your book.

If your goal is to be finished and published, publication of any kind is a success.

If your goal is to tell a specific story, the story will never be done until you tell to the right way.

If your goal is to get a certain message across to the reader, publication won’t be enough but marketing might be.

Success for me, for CHANGE OF MOMENTUM, is telling a story about redemption, love, forgiveness, and healing in a way that leaves the reader satisfied. The money I make, the number of sales, the month it gets published don’t matter as much as telling the story right.

For another book my goal might be different.

In another five years my definition of success might change.

But… that’s okay. 🙂

If you keep writing – and I hope you will – you’re going to change. You’ll learn new skills, become interested in new ideas, try different things. As you learn and grow, you’ll change. Success will change from book to book. Your writing skills will improve. Your marketing skills will improve. Your audience will shift and grow and mutate with each book.

Planning for those changes is going to make you a better writer. One, because you know that your best today will be different day by day. Two, because you can define success for the book you’re writing now and celebrate what you can accomplish today without worrying about what success will look like for the book you write ten years from now.

Keep writing.

Keep reading.

Keep growing.

And please keep forgiving me because CHANGE OF MOMENTUM is now coming out in April.

Love you!
Liana

 

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